“Butler plays real-life hero Sam Childers — the one man fearless enough to fight a ruthless army outnumbering him 1,000 to 1. The fierce edge that once led Childers to a life of crime now fuels his daring crusade into Africa’s most dangerous battle zones to rescue children from the clutches of rebel warlords. His mission is clear: protect the children, no matter the cost.” [Orlando Sentinal]

Thursday, 29 April 2010

"On Grey's Anatomy, you have to have make-out scenes – and it's probably best that you don't have a beer gut," says McKidd, 36, of keeping up with the McDreamys of the ER. "So I'm definitely conscious of exercise. But I like to have a Scotch at night. I'm Scottish so I'm not quite as strict."

Wednesday, 28 April 2010

James McAvoy (Atonement) stars as a decorated Union soldier who reluctantly agrees to defend one of the accused, boarding-house owner Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), whose son was the lone conspirator to escape the manhunt.

"There was a question of whether she was complicit, guilty by association, or even more guilty," says Redford, who directs but doesn't star in the movie. "The lawyer that defended her didn't want to defend her. He was a Union soldier who became a lawyer." His contempt for the suspect gives way to a fear that she is being prosecuted solely to bring her fugitive son out of hiding.

..."He barely survived the war. He was very heroic and won medals for bravery in the field, and comes back and wants to go back into law, and right away he's pulled into this case because no one else will defend this woman," Redford says.

...The Conspirator is independently financed and doesn't yet have a distributor. It's the first project made by the American Film Co., which plans to create historical dramas. [Anthony Breznican]

Tuesday, 27 April 2010

Kevin McKidd accepted his award at the 14th Annual Prism Awards last Thursday. He won in the Performance in a Drama Series category for Grey's Anatomy. You can watch Kevin's red carpet interview with ET, below:

REX IS NOT YOUR LAWYER: This off-cycle pilot staged a comeback after being pronounced dead when the network didn’t pick it up for midseason. The legal drama’s producers did more work on the pilot they had originally rushed, including adding voiceover. The reworked pilot tested well, and the project has received an order for two back-up scripts. [Deadline via ONTD!]

MovieWeb unveiled a brand new exclusive clip from Hamlet featuring David Tennant. After it airs on PBS on April 28, the DVD and Blu-ray will debut on May 4 in the US.

There's also a profile in The Times that you can read in full here. Part of the interview with Martin is posted below:

At about this time Compston even gave LA a second shot. He moved there, in the winter of 2007, and worked as a volunteer in a free health clinic on Beverly Boulevard. “I told everyone: ‘I’m going out there not to look for acting work, just to see if I can live there’. ” He says that his time there was “mad”, and that working at the clinic was often “horrible” — “There’d be a guy having a heart attack right in front of me, but because he couldn’t fill out his form nobody would touch him!”

Ultimately, he says, he planned a second professional assault on LA too, but the success of Alice Creed got in the way, and he hasn’t stopped working here since. He’s busy solidly for the entire year, and some of his forthcoming roles include playing a porn star in the crime film Pimp, a dancer in the drama Soul Boys and an ex-convict who has, yes, a raunchy sex scene in the horror movie Comedown. [Kevin Maher]

“We’re hoping to shoot in the summer and are fairly positive about it,” said Welsh, who is currently fine-tuning the screenplay while also writing his latest novel. “I’m pretty much tied up with the book and can’t make it out to Cannes, where we are planning to officially announce the film.” [Herald Scotland]

There also appears to be a new teaser poster featuring Sean Bean, with Dougray Scott getting third billing.

Kevin wrote an article for Finch’s Quarterly Review Issue 7 (via mckidd_fans). In it he "writes about his move from Scotland, via Rome, to Los Angeles, where he has now settled and introduced haggis." Part of his article is posted below, and you can read the full thing over at the source.

...I feel very blessed with the opportunities I have had – to work with the incredible cast in Grey’s Anatomy and to be a key player in a feature film like Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

...Most of my scenes are with Sean Bean, who plays Zeus. I had never worked with Sean and it was an interesting experience as, initially, he comes across as reserved. Our first scene was at the top of the Empire State Building and I had to walk up to him (we play brothers in the film) and say, “Zeus”, and he turns to me and says, “Poseidon.” For some reason, on the very first take, these two lines seemed to tickle us and we just couldn’t get through them – there was just something so absurd about Sean Bean and me pretending to be Greek Gods, so it took us quite a while to get started. He is much more of a giggler than I would have imagined! Sean is from the North of England so it was quite amusing to have a Scotsman and a Northerner playing Greek Gods in an American blockbuster shooting in Vancouver.

When you get a bunch of British actors together there is a feeling that you could all be doing a play in some dodgy theatre above the pub. Everybody falls back to that same attitude. None of us works behind a desk for the very reason that we wanted to do something silly for a living. It’s always a laugh, and you are not allowed to take it too seriously.

Since completing The Ghost, Ewan has been able to fulfil an ambition to work with his uncle Denis Lawson, whose exploits in the original Star Wars movies inspired his young nephew back in Crieff, Scotland.

“I love him to death and he is the only person I ever turn to if I need to speak about work.

“I went to start work on The Last Word with David Mackenzie, who I made Young Adam with. I play a chef and there was a nice relationship with the owner of the restaurant. I could just see me and my uncle in those parts together. I suggested it as many times as I felt was polite because it had to be David’s decision.

“It was just lovely to be on set with him and playing two Scottish characters in Scotland.” [Alison Jones]

There hasn't been much news on The Great Pretender in nearly two years, but evidently Peter Capaldi is still trying to get the project off the ground. The film is set in 1938 and back in 2008 IMDb listed the plot as being about two producers who "hire Hollywood star Leslie Grangely (McGregor) to play Bonnie Prince Charlie (also McGregor) in a movie about the 18th century Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland. Soon afterward, a drunk Grangely disappears and the producers are forced to find a replacement. They trick a lookalike extra into playing the role of Bonnie Prince Charlie, "The Great Pretender." It looks like the film is still in development:

He is also hoping to work for another fellow countryman, Peter Capaldi, on The Great Pretender, which would present him with a formidable challenge as he would be called on to play four roles.

However, the pet project written by the In The Loop star has unfortunately been caught up in a legal tangle over rights.

“It is a funny situation to be in when it is your creation, to be stuck,” says Ewan. “I told Peter ‘I may be too old for this in a minute. Hurry up’. But he has reassured me we should be all right.” [Alison Jones ]

Due later this year, Henshall will play German officer, Werner Kraus in Serbo-Croation film How I Was Stolen by the Germans.

“My wife is Croatian and we have a friend who is a producer in Belgrade and he was in London saying ‘how do you fancy coming to Serbia to do a film there?’ I said ‘sure’ so he sent me the script where I play a German officer in World War Two who falls for this little boy. The boy doesn’t know who his father is and ends up wanting this German officer to be his dad. It’s a very nice story.”

“I don’t speak German and (director) Misa (Radivojevic) is 90% deaf and doesn’t speak English, but I had a number of interpreters and everyone wanted to help. But I had a nice time, Misa is a proper auteur, it was a very creative place to work.”

...Another film due later this year is Kevin MacDonald’s epic, The Eagle of the Ninth. Unlike rival film, Neil Marshall’s Centurion, The Eagle of the Ninth will focus on Channing Tatum’s attempts to find his lost legion’s golden emblem in honour of his late father.

...“I have a small part, the first fifteen minutes, if that. I haven’t seen it or done any ADR yet so I might not even last that long! The chief of my part is a chariot race through the forrest with Channing Tatum and I just had the best time. The chariots were amazing, for the real hairy stuff they had stuntmen, but I got to do most of it myself. I had such a ball.” [Richard Bodsworth]

Thursday, 15 April 2010

There seems to be no end to the drama with this film. Last week, Consolidated Pictures GrouppulledI Love You Phillip Morris with Ewan McGregor from its already rescheduled April 30 release date, and then moved its release to July 30. Now the financiers of the film, EuropaCorp, have taken the North American rights from Consolidated Pictures Group for breach of contract:

The deal struck when the film was picked up at Sundance was a $3 million guarantee to EuropaCorp for the film a promise of an $8 million marketing campaign by CPG. Apparently, the $3 million guarantee was to be paid upon delivery of the film. Well, apparently EuropaCorp handed over the film 90 days ago, but didn't receive their minimum payment putting the wheels in motion for CPG to lose the film, but they aren't going down without a fight.

“We’re the distributors right now, we have a contract and we’re asking Europa to deliver certain things. We’ve hired legal counsel, and if we need to go to arbitration, we will. We plan to distribute this film,” CPG's Timothy Patrick Cavanaugh.

Further complicating matters is the fact that CPG has already struck deals with Canadian distributor Alliance Atlantis for the film to play north of the border, as well as a DVD deal with Fox to distribute the picture on home video. There's no word yet if those deals with remain intact or if they will have to be renegotiated.

Quietly coming in to score the film in the wake of this mess is another small, but more firmly established distributor, Newmarket Films. According to sources if EuropaCorp gets the film back in their hands, they hand off the North American rights to Newmarket Films who would release the film this fall.

But all this is a big "if." Should CPG fight to hang onto the film, "I Love You Phillip Morris" could end up tied up courts for the immediately forseeable future. Our guess is that they will try and get some kind of arbitration deal worked out though if they failed to meet the obligations of their contract, we what EuropaCorp would have to gain out of such a scenario. [The Playlist]

So basically, until this is sorted out, no I Love You Phillip Morris in North America.

Excerpts from two new interviews with Henry Ian Cusick are posted below. The first is from Vulture which you can read in full here. The excerpt is from TVOvermind which you can read here.

Was it in your contract that the episodes focused on Desmond need to be epic ones?No, [laughs], I have nothing in my contract. It's been a fluke, really. When Carlton [Cuse] told me about the possibility about coming back, I had no idea what they had in mind. The episodes that I've been given have all been great pieces of writing and great fun to play. But now that the show is coming to an end I will not have another Desmond-centric episode. I'm delighted that it ended on one like "Happily Ever After."

So ... you're currently filming the finale. Want to tell us something about it we don't know?Well ... all the actors have been given a script that contains ten acts. There is an eleventh act that we haven't got yet. And in that eleventh act, there's a secret scene that no one — not even the people that [are in] the eleventh act — have got the secret scenes. At the moment, we have, what, 24 days to shoot these two episodes, the series finale. I haven't been on set all that much recently, but, from what I understand, what they're shooting now has been really physically demanding. There's a lot of wetness and a lot of bruises. I think the stunt work is going to be pretty cool. [Mike Ryan]

Desmond is obviously one of the fan’s favorites. Are fan’s going to be satisfied with where he ends up?

You know what? I don’t know where he ends up yet, we haven’t been given the final chapter of the script so we’re all waiting for the season finale’s final act, so I can’t answer that honestly. I think the writers have done pretty good so far, so we’ve just got to keep going with them and trust that it’ll be good. I don’t know, and nobody knows how it’s going to end up.

....Has anybody made any plans as far as watching the final episode or what they’re gonna do when it airs?

I think there’s some sort of press thing happening in LA for the finale. I haven’t thought about it yet and I’m not entirely sure. At the moment I’m just thinking and concentrating on the work.

When do you guys actually wrap the season?’

We finish on April the 21st or 22nd, I can’t remember the exact date but in two weeks.

It’s gonna be a strange thing. I don’t know how I’ll react the day after, when I realize I haven’t got a job. So that’ll be interesting. [Jon Lachonis]

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Kevin McKidd is scheduled to present at this year's Prism Awards on April 22 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The Prism Awards honors movies, music, comic books, and television that accurately depicts substance abuse, addiction, and mental health issues.

Kevin is nominated in the Performance in a Drama Series Multi-Episode Storyline category and Grey's Anatomy is nominated in the Drama Series Multi-Episode Storyline category.

Last week, Consolidated Pictures GrouppulledI Love You Phillip Morris with Ewan McGregor from its already rescheduled April 30 release date without announcing a new release date. The film now has a new limited July 30 release and an expansion on August 6, though according to one of Jim Carrey's tweets the film is set to open in the fall. With this being probably the fourth reschedule it's likely that these dates could be changed yet again. Stay tuned.

Friday, 9 April 2010

This is really disappointing news. Consolidated Pictures Group, the company distributing I Love You Phillip Morris has postponed the film's US release again. The film, starring Ewan McGregor, had been scheduled for a Valentine's Day release, then a March 26 release, and was then rescheduled for April 30 for a limited release before being expanded in the weeks after. A spokesperson announced that the film has once again been delayed and will not be released on April 30. No release date has been scheduled.

CinemaNX is giving UK fans the opportunity to win the UK premiere of The Disappearance of Alice Creed at their local cinema. All you have to do is nominate your local cinema and get enough votes to win the premiere. Head on over to the film's Facebook page for you chance to enter. The Disappearance of Alice Creed stars Martin Compston and opens on April 30 in the UK.

Synopsis: On a suburban street, two masked men seize a young woman. They bind and gag her and take her to an abandoned, soundproofed apartment. She is Alice Creed, daughter of a millionaire. Her kidnappers, the coldly efficient Vic and his younger accomplice Danny, have worked out a meticulous plan. But Alice is not going to play the perfect victim – she’s not giving in without a fight. In a tense power-play of greed, duplicity and survival we discover that sometimes disappearances can be deceptive…

Thanks to the folks at CinemaNX for providing the artwork and sharing the information about the contest with us.

...In January, there was talk of an American version of “Torchwood” being developed by series creator Davies and his creative team for the FOX network, for which Barrowman seemed more than willing to participate.

“If it was going to happen, there would be hopefully Russell writing it. There would be no change to Captain Jack. He would still be the same sexually charged character that he is, and it would pick up from where it left off,” he hoped.

“I know that there’s discussions happening right now with some American networks. That’s all I know. Julie Gardner and Russell T. Davies (the executive producers), have said there will be no ‘Torchwood’ without John Barrowman, without Captain Jack. So I’ll be there and I’m just waiting to hear like everybody else,” he added.

Though once talk began of bringing the show to the U.S., there were immediate concerns from fans that Captain Jack’s openly free spirited nature would be toned down for the wider network audience.

“Captain Jack is not gay, he’s omni-sexual and he will sleep with anything with a zip code. If any network were to do that, it would be silly because the reason Jack works is because he connects with so many and very different people out there. But you know if Russell’s writing it, he won’t do that,” Barrowman assured “Torchwood” fans. [Jim Kiernan]

Friday, 2 April 2010

The Good Heart's official poster and trailer were unveiled about a month ago, and now Magnolia Pictureshas released the red-band trailer posted below. The Good Heart re-teams Brian Cox and Paul Dano and is about an ailing bartender (Cox) who takes in a homeless suicidal young man (Dano). The film will be released on Video-On-Demand on April 2 and in theaters on April 30 in the US.

Craig Ferguson was among the winners of the 69th Annual Peabody Awards. The winners were announced yesterday for 2009 at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The prize is handed out for achievement in electronic media (including broadcast, cablecast, radio, and webcast programming). The reason for The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson's win was included:

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (CBS): the witty Scottish-born host makes late-night TV safe for ideas - noted for his interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu

“I didn’t know I’d been nominated,” Ferguson told me today...Ferguson said he was “humbled, which is why I had to have an alligator puppet announce it on the show instead of me. It seemed more seemly that way.”

Ferguson won for his Late Late Show interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “I suppose when you have someone who’s as thoughtful and life-changing as Bishop Tutu on, it increases your chances more than if I’d interviewed, say, Mark Harmon, as lovely a man as Mark Harmon is,” he said. “But I’m very mindful of the fact that the next night, my guest was Paris Hilton. You have to keep these things in perspective.”

Craig, er, I mean Wavey, talked about Craig's win on The Late Late Show last night:

Thursday, 1 April 2010

Thirteen-foot-tall mahogany doors with a knocker that could summon the dead. A ceiling fresco depicting the rape of Ganymede. Plaster walls chipped and mottled with age, massive columns supporting limestone lions, crystal chandeliers casting spidery shadows…. Medieval castle? Ancestral manor house? Try a two-story loft in the heart of New York’s ultratrendy Chelsea district. The doors alone are remarkable enough to stop the most jaded Manhattanite in his tracks: Who in the world lives here?

Why, King Leonidas of Sparta, who else? The place starts to make a little more sense when one considers that its owner is the actor Gerard Butler, and Gerard Butler is known for channeling such larger-than-life figures as the Spartan king, Attila the Hun, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera and Beowulf. “I wanted something elegant and gorgeous and at the same time rather masculine and raw,” the actor declares, his Glasgow burr somehow enhancing the description. “I guess I would describe the apartment as bohemian old-world rustic château with a taste of baroque.” [Peter Haldeman]

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